10 ms·

Feynman’s Razor

357 points by mmoustafa 2y ago

cde-v 2y ago
That isn't a razor...
- drewcoo 2y ago
  nods to Crocodile Dundee . . .
  - moffkalast 2y ago
    Just physicists havin' fun.
- px43 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor > In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.
  - cde-v 2y ago
    I'd say it is too reactive to be a razor as opposed to a rule that would prevent dumbing it down too far to begin with.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    I still wouldn't call it a razor. A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice. Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.
- sfink 2y ago
  How so? If you have a pile of explanations, you now have a way of dividing up the pile into ones you may want to keep and ones you should discard. That way is by asking whether an expert would understand what you're talking about. Occam's Razor takes a pile of explanations and discards all those with extra assumptions or components. Feynman's discards all those that don't convey anything to an expert. I once told my son that any good story involves surprise, a relatable character, and some mention of a giant talking carrot. All of those are razors. (Some razors might be more useful than others...)
- Tao3300 2y ago
  Where's the metarazor that helps us weed out what is or isn't a razor?
drewcoo 2y ago
Feynman confused pedagogical skill with expertise in a given field. He insisted that experts could explain things. No, that's what a teacher does. Feynman was good at both and apparently had no one to challenge him on his claim that they were the same. It's possible to be a great teacher without being an expert on given subject matter. And it's possible to have the most expertise but be inscrutable. In the case of this quote, Feynman wasn't talking about expertise at all, but about explaining a thing with enough relevant details to be understood. Without those, a layman would not understand either.
- admax88qqq 2y ago
  Maybe. I think Feynman had a point. From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding. Language and knowledge are linked to a degree. Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    > From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding. You also have to give yourself permission to step several tiers back and think about how to distill "next pieces" into what they know. I also find myself handwaving away a whole lot of edge cases or rigor away in order to have a bite-sized step that will help the student make progress. > Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved. Conversely, I find every time I've done this exercise of stepping back and breaking it down for someone else, my knowledge has deepened.
  - exe34 2y ago
    My biggest challenge with explaining things to people is the stuff they already know that's either wrong or not relevant. To save the effort of finding out later, I now ask people to explain it to me first, tell me everything they know about this, before I can figure out how far back I have to step before explaining it all.
scarmig 2y ago
I agree this is true if your goal is to inform. If, however, your goal is to increase clicks, decrease support tickets, and get engagement, I'd be surprised if being technically descriptive and accurate is better than dumbing it down to the point of inaccuracy. None of that is to say that I agree with the goal of engagement over conveying information.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  It's important to begin violently opposing, not just disagreeing with, the theory of engagement and revenue creation. It must become dangerous indeed for those who decide to pursue those goals.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - exe34 2y ago
    If they pay your bills, it is very dangerous to say anything in fact.
    - barfbagginus 2y ago
      Collaborators always have their excuses, and yet freedom fighters always seem to ignore those very excuses. What makes the difference in outlook?
      - immibis 2y ago
        The latter doesn't value human life, even their own.
        barfbagginus 2y ago
        You think the person building technologies that cause human suffering values human life? Come on now.
hifrote 2y ago
Funny thing is I think this about Feynman’s own writing for “the layperson”. I think things like Feynman’s “little arrows” descriptions in QED only muddied and added to the mystique and mysticism of the physics he loved. Which is interesting because his written lectures[1], though, in their breadth and complexity require effort, seem as if they are intended for experts while being approachable to ”the layperson“. My only real complaint about those lectures is that even when I understood I rarely felt I had actionable tools for that new knowledge. The best descriptions of physics I feel that can sufficiently inform “the layperson” are ones that implements the physics in code[2], or through numerical methods. [1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ [2] https://www.lpfp.io/ https://www.lpfp.io/
- jarvist 2y ago
  What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). I suppose you could try and do it with more commonplace trigonometric functions, but then you lose the simple vector interpretation of adding the contributions. Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex numbers and the Euler identity to avoid strained analogies?
  - hifrote 2y ago
    > What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? It’s difficult to articulate, but two aspects are: The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain even modular arithmetic by calling on the clock analogy. And the fact that the little “clock hands” are a complete abstraction from both the physics being described and the mathematical models that describe that physics. ~“Quantum physics is just about adding clocks?” > I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). As I noted in the gp I think code implementations or numerical methods should be the goal. The solution to the confusion about referencing clocks when talking about modular arithmetic was just to write down a complete numerical example, ie all natural numbers mod 6 up to 10, and use that as the abstraction for further discussion: negatives, reals, periodicity, infinities, applications, et al.
xqcgrek2 2y ago
[flagged]
nostrebored 2y ago
The original message is enough information to deduce what’s probably going on as an expert and not feel alien to the customer base. What’s the point of conveying root causes to the user? In this case the error tells you what you need to know: copy the message. Send it again if you want. The point of communication isn’t always education. This isn’t a razor. It doesn’t do anything to help you consider audience. It will lead you to bad conclusions.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > The original message is enough information to deduce what’s probably going on as an expert I dunno, I had no idea what the original message was trying to convey; it wasn't until I read lisper's comment that I got what was going on.
ajkjk 2y ago
Sometimes it feels like the trend online right now is to design everything to make you stupider, on the theory that if it asks less of you will go along with it more easily. For instance, Google results seem more "least common denominator" every month. No longer can I search for something subtle and get subtle results; their algorithm pushes me towards and unhelpful answers. Maybe it's because lots of people do respond better to this, so it shows up better in the data. Anyway I hate it. I would like to gradually learn more as I interact with things, and engage with the complexity in systems, not have it hidden from me.
- amelius 2y ago
  If you design a system for idiots, only idiots will use it.
  - toss1 2y ago
    Sadly there's also the old saying that "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average customer" (P.T. Barnum ?).
    - gwd 2y ago
      I mean, yeah, there are certainly plenty of business models that rely on people not understanding what it is that they're buying. If you want to make your living that way, I can believe it's not that hard. But that doesn't mean that money can't be made by selling to intelligent people and attempting to educate the less informed. I know how I prefer to spend my short time here on Earth.
- pier25 2y ago
  Maybe at some point Google will release a Classic version of the algo like Coca-Cola did.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    It would be interesting to see, but my guess is that it would be exploited to death very quickly. There is a constant cat and mouse game between search engine and those who want to "optimize" their results. Going back and staying there would be like having the mouse stand still, not good. It would have to be a different product, developed in parallel, rather than a snapshot of the past.
jiggawatts 2y ago
I miss Norton Disk Doctor, not because I work on drive recovery but because it had an interface that respected the user’s intelligence. Every other storage-related system I’ve ever used either had inscrutable gibberish like: “Mode 5/7?” [Y] Or overly dumbed down questions like: Are you sure? [N] What am I sure about!? What is mode 5? Or is it 7? Both? What!? [1] Norton meanwhile had several paragraphs of text explaining what every decision meant. It explained concepts inline. It provided an explanation of the benefits and risks. It let you make an informed choice instead of just hitting Y over and over and hoping for the best. This kind of respect for the reader / user applies to all forms of technical writing such as manuals, user interfaces, blog articles, and API docs. Instead of trying to dumb down the text for a “lay” audience, try to educate all audiences to become more technical after having read and understood what you wrote. [1] That is verbatim from a Hitachi SAN array that was holding all of the data for a government department. The manual helpfully explained that this option toggles between mode 5/7 being either on or off. If you choose wrong the array will erase itself and kill your cat. Or neither of those things. Who knows?
- cubefox 2y ago
  A similar point applies to settings menus in software, especially advanced settings. It takes very little effort for people who make these settings to include e.g. a short tooltip explanation for every setting. Yet this is rarely done.
Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
>what the hell does this mean? The message doesn’t exist, but I can copy its contents? If I can copy its contents…why can’t I save it?? If it doesn’t exist why do I have to discard it?? Maybe it should be even less descriptive. "This message will soon no longer be available. Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later." Talking about the cache doesn't help the user. Really the solution is to add a button at the end of the message that says "save message contents to device." Then the message is clear and easily actionable.
- directevolve 2y ago
  The message could also give both this actionable advice and lisper's more technical explanation. You could label the more in-depth explanation or even put it on a second screen accessed via an 'advanced explanation' button.
powersnail 2y ago
I don't quite think the message-doesn't-exist example is caused by "dumbing down" too much. To me, the message "it no longer exists" is not the work of someone who, in trying to make layman understand, overdid it. Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context. From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is written to fetch something from the server, the server says it's not there, and well, the application should tell the user about it. Within the very narrow context of fetching it from the server, "doesn't exist" is correct. However, in the context of the user who's sitting there looking at the message, "doesn't exist" is simply false. The message needs to be re-contextualized, such that it makes sense. "The message doesn't exist on the server, it exists on your computer at the moment, but just for a short while, so you better copy it". It doesn't matter whether the user understand what a "server" is. Simply knowing that the message doesn't exist [at some place], is enough to make the whole sentence sensible. Like if I go to a car mechanic, who just points to the whole car and say "it's gonna be replaced", it would be confusing. But if he says that "xxx is gonna be replaced", that's perfectly comprehensible, even if I don't know what xxx is.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  "This message cannot be downloaded because it no longer exists on the server. You can copy the message or delete it."
  - smitty1e 2y ago
    A better phrasing might be "keep your local copy because your server-side copy is gone". Communication is hard. Welcome to people.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      That's not a better phrasing. That doesn't explain what happened at all. If you think that's a sensible recommendation, it's nice to add it after the error message. But it's not an error message.
sublinear 2y ago
To be great is to be misunderstood, and Feynman was a great man. I'm still not sure who decided to abuse some quotes and invent this "razor". I don't believe Feynman ever meant to overconstrain and corrupt information based on (likely incorrect) assumptions about his audience. There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children. The information is either there or it isn't regardless of who can comprehend it. Losslessness is non-negotiable. The real problem is how you present that information, not whether you should leave it out. The only time you should leave something out is if it has little to no relation to the rest of what you're trying to say. > This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted. Oh yeah also let's solve the "puzzle" from the middle of the blog post in Microsoft-y language everyone is familiar with by now. "This message was deleted due to your organization's retention policy, spam filter, or administrator. It temporarily remains on this device, but is at risk of being lost forever. Do you want to save a copy?" I believe in the real world Outlook doesn't even bother and has you and your message eat shit. If it was deleted it will never tell you about a cached copy and to the layperson it's just gone. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and indecision only makes communication harder.
- tredigi 2y ago
  > There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children. This is so wrong that I can't imagine you actually meant it in the way that it quite obviously reads like. When my 3-year old just saw is favorite toy fall from the sofa because he put it in an .. unstable position, then obviously it won't help if I explain the theory of relativity to him, cause ultimately it was gravity causing the mess. It won't help either to "dumb it down" by only explaining Newton's mechanics. What he actually needs to understand is that things fall down. Why exactly can be explained later. Much later. When he goes to university perhaps, if he chooses to and still wants to know.
  - lupire 2y ago
    That's not dumbing down. It's not a lie and it's not wrong.
neontomo 2y ago
If something can be explained without technical jargon in a way that satisfies novice and expert, what use is the jargon? I feel the example given in the article is bad because it isn't useful to either person, and jargon doesn't improve or lessen it. It's simply a poor explanation, which makes the argument weak.
- quibono 2y ago
  I agree. I think that most of the time highly specialized topics have a lot of subtle context required. You either communicate all of that, or use jargon to get around it. In some cases I think it's possible to do this and satisfy both groups but it's harder and takes more words (which is important in a media context at least). That said I imagine there's a spectrum here and you can usually find suitable middle ground.
photochemsyn 2y ago
Funny, I always thought Feynman's Razor was along these lines (from 1979 QED lectures in New Zealand, response to audience question): > Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?" > A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance." As far as complexity and how to explain things to people without technical experience of the subject, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Here's a nice quote from the rotation in space section of the caltech lectures: > "We shall not use these equations in all their generality and study all their consequences, because this would take many years, and we must soon turn to other subjects. In an introductory course we can present only the fundamental laws and apply them to a very few situations of special interest."
- mock-possum 2y ago
  That’s such a typical Feynman answer too. charitably he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to misspeak or suggest something untrue from his position of expertise - but it does also come off as being dodgy about answering people’s questions. He does the exact same thing in that video clip where an interviewers asks him how magnets work .
  - photochemsyn 2y ago
    That's just part of the answer, he goes on to say that if you ask questions of nature and don't like the answers then that's just too bad, you don't get to dictate to nature how to behave. Scientists who don't like particular results because they don't match their philosophy of how things should be (most famously Einstein and QM) tend to end up tilting at windmills and not making any more progress. However, humans can't help having likes and dislikes but I think the trick is to save that for other areas of interest - e.g., art or music or people or activities that you like for entirely subjective reasons.
lisper 2y ago
> My favorite comment was from lisper... Cool! Someone noticed me! :-) (I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)
- neontomo 2y ago
  Your profile link is broken, where can I find out more? If you were advertising yourself what would you ask me to read? (giving you a wildcard here)
  - sneak 2y ago
    This seems like a good point to beat my drum: put your email address in your HN profile, people! A website link also wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise if someone wants to follow up with you about a comment, there is no way to do so without spamming a public comment reply. Contact info!
    - tredigi 2y ago
      That won't work because many people here post anonymously. They have a throwaway account and make a new one now and then to leave no trace to their real identity. Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account. Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it. Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here. I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
      - user_7832 2y ago
        > Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account. Apple's hide my email or DDG's email services are good for that imo. > I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now. Take a guess ;)
mihaic 2y ago
While there really is a trend to overly dumb down things, I'd just like to speculate that the "message no longer exists" part is simply these when someone adapted the reasonable error for a delete message, and forgot to actually check if that phrasing work anymore. Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.
protomolecule 2y ago
Funny that the author himself failed to reproduce Feynman's quote: it should be "And there are now sixty two kinds of particles", not "And there are not sixty two kinds of particles".
nicbou 2y ago
I struggle a lot with this in my work. I can’t assume that my readers are fluent English speakers, nor that they understand the topic. I can’t even assume that they care to understand. I have adopted a plain and unambiguous writing style that hopefully accounts for it. I am now experimenting with formatting that allows them to skim everything and still get the gist of it. In my opinion, nhs.uk is the best example to learn from. People are not stupid, but they are busy, tired, lazy, or simply not that interested in the finer details. There is a balance between respecting their intellect and respecting their time.
- kohbo 2y ago
  How come you're avoiding every contraction, except "can't"?
  - zexbha 2y ago
    I would not have observed this on my own. Do contractions make English harder to comprehend for non-natives? I'll have to avoid using y'all'dn't've
    - Aspos 2y ago
      Yes they do
  - lupire 2y ago
    Common English. The "n't” contractions are the most comfortable, and "can't" is most comfortable because it saves a syllable.
  - DavidPiper 2y ago
    That's a cool observation - it could just be GP's natural turn of phrase. I know a few people who never use any contractions when they speak. I assume it's a local/familial style.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 2y ago
fragmede 2y ago
“This message will self-destruct after reading.”
faku312 2y ago
[flagged]
MrPatan 2y ago
In UX, the right way to think about your users is not that they are dumb, but that they are very smart but very busy, and don't have time for your app's bullshit. It puts you in the right frame of mind when designing interfaces. It's not about dealing with dunces, but about being efficient with peoples time and attention.
bluenose69 2y ago
The "This message can't be saved" text is not that bad, actually. The important thing is that the second part tells the user what to do. The first part could be rewritten "An error occurred" and that would be fine, too, since the details are not likely to matter to the user -- the important thing is what the user ought to do next. A driver does not need to know the reason for a detour. All that matters is whether the alternative route is clearly indicated.
- eastbound 2y ago
  It’s pretty important to know the cause, though. “The message doesn’t exist” is fairly different from “You password/token/auth is expired and thus, the message can’t be saved”. Or “the hard drive is unavailable” or “the network has timed out”. It’s also important to know what action can’t be done. “The message can’t be saved” from “The message can’t be viewed anymore” which hints that it may have been properly saved. Please don’t bring back the fashion of dialog boxes just showing “Error in the system”. Or even “Error 1521”, which, although nowadays it would help for a perfect StackOverflow search, is still annoying.
satisfice 2y ago
The author introduces a distinction that I hadn't fully considered before: difficult writing is not all equally problematic. Being misunderstood is a problem, but how and why you are misunderstood matters.
wszrfcbhujnikm 2y ago
Nah I like New Scientist and Quanta Magazine etc… to give me an insight into a complicated topic. It isn’t adequate for a professor to understand the subject to write a thesis sure, but there is no harm in more people kinda understanding something. This is especially true of the sort of dumbing down the big short film did, when the impact on society means everyone should sort of understand what happened Nd why the economy tanked.
- amelius 2y ago
  I dunno. We now have ChatGPT to dumb things down for us __and__ allow us to ask questions. I think the importance of these popular science magazines may be disappearing.
- OmarShehata 2y ago
  Quanta is a great example! They don't dumb things down. It passes feymans razor because the professor can read it and know what it's talking about I think it'd be a fun follow-up and talk a quanta article, and some PhD in the topic, and walk through why it does (or does not) pass this razor. I think one very simple but important thing they do is they don't shy away from mentioning the technical terms. I just opened a random one and in the first paragraph they say the word "Hamiltonian cycle", and explain it. The explanation is probably super simplified, but that's fine, it's (1) an anchor for the curious layperson to read more/Google it (2) it's a marker for the expert, he immediately knows what they're talking about, and doesn't have to try to reconstruct it/guess
greekanalyst 2y ago
Simplicity is key, but over-simplicity is a killer.
taneq 2y ago
Something I’ve been doing recently is declaring a variable, writing a comment explaining clearly what the variable actually does, then renaming the variable to reflect the comment. If I have to explain the variable name too much then it’s not a good name.
ordu 2y ago
Why this obsession with "all words must be known"? People are perfectly capable to understand the core of the message even if it contains unknown words. It happens not every time, it doesn't happen for example when each one of the words is unknown, but the message: > "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted." can be understood. Even if the first sentence looks like a technical garbage, the second gives the clear instructions. And I don't believe that the first sentence is a complete nonsense to a layman. It can be understood as "message is halfway through the process of the deletion".
mannykannot 2y ago
There's an association here to another topic which came up recently: a review of Matt Strassler's new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea [1]. Professor Strassler says a big motivation for writing this book was what he calls 'phibs': 'explanations' of physics so bowdlerized that they are not just uninformative, but at least misleading and sometimes outright wrong. The particular phib which got him started was a commonly-repeated attempt to give an idea of how the Higgs field gives rise to the masses of certain particles [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307 [2] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field-is-nothing-like-molasses-soup-or-a-crowd/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...
aaron695 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Archelaos 2y ago
The case of the original error message does not really match what Feynman was concerned about. The original error message was not too simple, but its first part was some hocus-pocus that made (almost) no sense -- the less, the more the reader is a layperson. Only an expert had a chance of guessing the explanation. In the quoted passage, Feynman instead was concerned about popular accounts of science that are not useful for the reader -- not because they are unintelligible or wrong, but because they are too simplistic and provide too less information.
corinn3 2y ago
Yeah computing day to day sure is mired in euphemisms for math. Cache is a variable. Server is a function. Anyone who graduated high school should know that much. Hopefully we’ll start to move away from 1900s ignorant business machines euphemisms for applied physics
amai 2y ago
„Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.“ The last part of this quote is often forgotten.

Feynman’s Razor

357 points by mmoustafa 2y ago

cde-v 2y ago

That isn't a razor...

drewcoo 2y ago
nods to Crocodile Dundee . . .
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Just physicists havin' fun.
px43 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor > In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.
- cde-v 2y ago
  I'd say it is too reactive to be a razor as opposed to a rule that would prevent dumbing it down too far to begin with.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  I still wouldn't call it a razor. A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice. Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.
sfink 2y ago
How so? If you have a pile of explanations, you now have a way of dividing up the pile into ones you may want to keep and ones you should discard. That way is by asking whether an expert would understand what you're talking about. Occam's Razor takes a pile of explanations and discards all those with extra assumptions or components. Feynman's discards all those that don't convey anything to an expert. I once told my son that any good story involves surprise, a relatable character, and some mention of a giant talking carrot. All of those are razors. (Some razors might be more useful than others...)
Tao3300 2y ago
Where's the metarazor that helps us weed out what is or isn't a razor?

drewcoo 2y ago

Feynman confused pedagogical skill with expertise in a given field. He insisted that experts could explain things. No, that's what a teacher does. Feynman was good at both and apparently had no one to challenge him on his claim that they were the same. It's possible to be a great teacher without being an expert on given subject matter. And it's possible to have the most expertise but be inscrutable. In the case of this quote, Feynman wasn't talking about expertise at all, but about explaining a thing with enough relevant details to be understood. Without those, a layman would not understand either.

admax88qqq 2y ago
Maybe. I think Feynman had a point. From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding. Language and knowledge are linked to a degree. Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
- mlyle 2y ago
  > From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding. You also have to give yourself permission to step several tiers back and think about how to distill "next pieces" into what they know. I also find myself handwaving away a whole lot of edge cases or rigor away in order to have a bite-sized step that will help the student make progress. > Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved. Conversely, I find every time I've done this exercise of stepping back and breaking it down for someone else, my knowledge has deepened.
- exe34 2y ago
  My biggest challenge with explaining things to people is the stuff they already know that's either wrong or not relevant. To save the effort of finding out later, I now ask people to explain it to me first, tell me everything they know about this, before I can figure out how far back I have to step before explaining it all.

scarmig 2y ago

I agree this is true if your goal is to inform. If, however, your goal is to increase clicks, decrease support tickets, and get engagement, I'd be surprised if being technically descriptive and accurate is better than dumbing it down to the point of inaccuracy. None of that is to say that I agree with the goal of engagement over conveying information.

barfbagginus 2y ago
It's important to begin violently opposing, not just disagreeing with, the theory of engagement and revenue creation. It must become dangerous indeed for those who decide to pursue those goals.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- exe34 2y ago
  If they pay your bills, it is very dangerous to say anything in fact.
  - barfbagginus 2y ago
    Collaborators always have their excuses, and yet freedom fighters always seem to ignore those very excuses. What makes the difference in outlook?
    - immibis 2y ago
      The latter doesn't value human life, even their own.
      - barfbagginus 2y ago
        You think the person building technologies that cause human suffering values human life? Come on now.

hifrote 2y ago

Funny thing is I think this about Feynman’s own writing for “the layperson”. I think things like Feynman’s “little arrows” descriptions in QED only muddied and added to the mystique and mysticism of the physics he loved. Which is interesting because his written lectures[1], though, in their breadth and complexity require effort, seem as if they are intended for experts while being approachable to ”the layperson“. My only real complaint about those lectures is that even when I understood I rarely felt I had actionable tools for that new knowledge. The best descriptions of physics I feel that can sufficiently inform “the layperson” are ones that implements the physics in code[2], or through numerical methods. [1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ [2] https://www.lpfp.io/ https://www.lpfp.io/

jarvist 2y ago
What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). I suppose you could try and do it with more commonplace trigonometric functions, but then you lose the simple vector interpretation of adding the contributions. Or are you arguing that you should always try and teach complex numbers and the Euler identity to avoid strained analogies?
- hifrote 2y ago
  > What do you not like about Feynman's "little arrows" / rotating clock hands in the QED book? It’s difficult to articulate, but two aspects are: The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain even modular arithmetic by calling on the clock analogy. And the fact that the little “clock hands” are a complete abstraction from both the physics being described and the mathematical models that describe that physics. ~“Quantum physics is just about adding clocks?” > I can't think of a more simple metaphor for the exponential of a complex phase, exp(i omega t). As I noted in the gp I think code implementations or numerical methods should be the goal. The solution to the confusion about referencing clocks when talking about modular arithmetic was just to write down a complete numerical example, ie all natural numbers mod 6 up to 10, and use that as the abstraction for further discussion: negatives, reals, periodicity, infinities, applications, et al.

xqcgrek2 2y ago

[flagged]

nostrebored 2y ago

The original message is enough information to deduce what’s probably going on as an expert and not feel alien to the customer base. What’s the point of conveying root causes to the user? In this case the error tells you what you need to know: copy the message. Send it again if you want. The point of communication isn’t always education. This isn’t a razor. It doesn’t do anything to help you consider audience. It will lead you to bad conclusions.

pdonis 2y ago
> The original message is enough information to deduce what’s probably going on as an expert I dunno, I had no idea what the original message was trying to convey; it wasn't until I read lisper's comment that I got what was going on.

ajkjk 2y ago

Sometimes it feels like the trend online right now is to design everything to make you stupider, on the theory that if it asks less of you will go along with it more easily. For instance, Google results seem more "least common denominator" every month. No longer can I search for something subtle and get subtle results; their algorithm pushes me towards and unhelpful answers. Maybe it's because lots of people do respond better to this, so it shows up better in the data. Anyway I hate it. I would like to gradually learn more as I interact with things, and engage with the complexity in systems, not have it hidden from me.

amelius 2y ago
If you design a system for idiots, only idiots will use it.
- toss1 2y ago
  Sadly there's also the old saying that "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average customer" (P.T. Barnum ?).
  - gwd 2y ago
    I mean, yeah, there are certainly plenty of business models that rely on people not understanding what it is that they're buying. If you want to make your living that way, I can believe it's not that hard. But that doesn't mean that money can't be made by selling to intelligent people and attempting to educate the less informed. I know how I prefer to spend my short time here on Earth.
pier25 2y ago
Maybe at some point Google will release a Classic version of the algo like Coca-Cola did.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  It would be interesting to see, but my guess is that it would be exploited to death very quickly. There is a constant cat and mouse game between search engine and those who want to "optimize" their results. Going back and staying there would be like having the mouse stand still, not good. It would have to be a different product, developed in parallel, rather than a snapshot of the past.

jiggawatts 2y ago

I miss Norton Disk Doctor, not because I work on drive recovery but because it had an interface that respected the user’s intelligence. Every other storage-related system I’ve ever used either had inscrutable gibberish like: “Mode 5/7?” [Y] Or overly dumbed down questions like: Are you sure? [N] What am I sure about!? What is mode 5? Or is it 7? Both? What!? [1] Norton meanwhile had several paragraphs of text explaining what every decision meant. It explained concepts inline. It provided an explanation of the benefits and risks. It let you make an informed choice instead of just hitting Y over and over and hoping for the best. This kind of respect for the reader / user applies to all forms of technical writing such as manuals, user interfaces, blog articles, and API docs. Instead of trying to dumb down the text for a “lay” audience, try to educate all audiences to become more technical after having read and understood what you wrote. [1] That is verbatim from a Hitachi SAN array that was holding all of the data for a government department. The manual helpfully explained that this option toggles between mode 5/7 being either on or off. If you choose wrong the array will erase itself and kill your cat. Or neither of those things. Who knows?

cubefox 2y ago
A similar point applies to settings menus in software, especially advanced settings. It takes very little effort for people who make these settings to include e.g. a short tooltip explanation for every setting. Yet this is rarely done.

Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago

>what the hell does this mean? The message doesn’t exist, but I can copy its contents? If I can copy its contents…why can’t I save it?? If it doesn’t exist why do I have to discard it?? Maybe it should be even less descriptive. "This message will soon no longer be available. Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later." Talking about the cache doesn't help the user. Really the solution is to add a button at the end of the message that says "save message contents to device." Then the message is clear and easily actionable.

directevolve 2y ago
The message could also give both this actionable advice and lisper's more technical explanation. You could label the more in-depth explanation or even put it on a second screen accessed via an 'advanced explanation' button.

powersnail 2y ago

I don't quite think the message-doesn't-exist example is caused by "dumbing down" too much. To me, the message "it no longer exists" is not the work of someone who, in trying to make layman understand, overdid it. Instead, it's the typical kind of mistake made by writers who forget about context. From the programmer's perspective, I speculate, the error _is_ indeed a case of something being non-existent. The code is written to fetch something from the server, the server says it's not there, and well, the application should tell the user about it. Within the very narrow context of fetching it from the server, "doesn't exist" is correct. However, in the context of the user who's sitting there looking at the message, "doesn't exist" is simply false. The message needs to be re-contextualized, such that it makes sense. "The message doesn't exist on the server, it exists on your computer at the moment, but just for a short while, so you better copy it". It doesn't matter whether the user understand what a "server" is. Simply knowing that the message doesn't exist [at some place], is enough to make the whole sentence sensible. Like if I go to a car mechanic, who just points to the whole car and say "it's gonna be replaced", it would be confusing. But if he says that "xxx is gonna be replaced", that's perfectly comprehensible, even if I don't know what xxx is.

LoganDark 2y ago
"This message cannot be downloaded because it no longer exists on the server. You can copy the message or delete it."
- smitty1e 2y ago
  A better phrasing might be "keep your local copy because your server-side copy is gone". Communication is hard. Welcome to people.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    That's not a better phrasing. That doesn't explain what happened at all. If you think that's a sensible recommendation, it's nice to add it after the error message. But it's not an error message.

sublinear 2y ago

To be great is to be misunderstood, and Feynman was a great man. I'm still not sure who decided to abuse some quotes and invent this "razor". I don't believe Feynman ever meant to overconstrain and corrupt information based on (likely incorrect) assumptions about his audience. There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children. The information is either there or it isn't regardless of who can comprehend it. Losslessness is non-negotiable. The real problem is how you present that information, not whether you should leave it out. The only time you should leave something out is if it has little to no relation to the rest of what you're trying to say. > This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted. Oh yeah also let's solve the "puzzle" from the middle of the blog post in Microsoft-y language everyone is familiar with by now. "This message was deleted due to your organization's retention policy, spam filter, or administrator. It temporarily remains on this device, but is at risk of being lost forever. Do you want to save a copy?" I believe in the real world Outlook doesn't even bother and has you and your message eat shit. If it was deleted it will never tell you about a cached copy and to the layperson it's just gone. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and indecision only makes communication harder.

tredigi 2y ago
> There's no need to "dumb down" anything ever, not even for children. This is so wrong that I can't imagine you actually meant it in the way that it quite obviously reads like. When my 3-year old just saw is favorite toy fall from the sofa because he put it in an .. unstable position, then obviously it won't help if I explain the theory of relativity to him, cause ultimately it was gravity causing the mess. It won't help either to "dumb it down" by only explaining Newton's mechanics. What he actually needs to understand is that things fall down. Why exactly can be explained later. Much later. When he goes to university perhaps, if he chooses to and still wants to know.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's not dumbing down. It's not a lie and it's not wrong.

neontomo 2y ago

If something can be explained without technical jargon in a way that satisfies novice and expert, what use is the jargon? I feel the example given in the article is bad because it isn't useful to either person, and jargon doesn't improve or lessen it. It's simply a poor explanation, which makes the argument weak.

quibono 2y ago
I agree. I think that most of the time highly specialized topics have a lot of subtle context required. You either communicate all of that, or use jargon to get around it. In some cases I think it's possible to do this and satisfy both groups but it's harder and takes more words (which is important in a media context at least). That said I imagine there's a spectrum here and you can usually find suitable middle ground.

photochemsyn 2y ago

Funny, I always thought Feynman's Razor was along these lines (from 1979 QED lectures in New Zealand, response to audience question): > Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?" > A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance." As far as complexity and how to explain things to people without technical experience of the subject, the rabbit hole always goes deeper. Here's a nice quote from the rotation in space section of the caltech lectures: > "We shall not use these equations in all their generality and study all their consequences, because this would take many years, and we must soon turn to other subjects. In an introductory course we can present only the fundamental laws and apply them to a very few situations of special interest."

mock-possum 2y ago
That’s such a typical Feynman answer too. charitably he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to misspeak or suggest something untrue from his position of expertise - but it does also come off as being dodgy about answering people’s questions. He does the exact same thing in that video clip where an interviewers asks him how magnets work .
- photochemsyn 2y ago
  That's just part of the answer, he goes on to say that if you ask questions of nature and don't like the answers then that's just too bad, you don't get to dictate to nature how to behave. Scientists who don't like particular results because they don't match their philosophy of how things should be (most famously Einstein and QM) tend to end up tilting at windmills and not making any more progress. However, humans can't help having likes and dislikes but I think the trick is to save that for other areas of interest - e.g., art or music or people or activities that you like for entirely subjective reasons.

lisper 2y ago

> My favorite comment was from lisper... Cool! Someone noticed me! :-) (I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)

neontomo 2y ago
Your profile link is broken, where can I find out more? If you were advertising yourself what would you ask me to read? (giving you a wildcard here)
- sneak 2y ago
  This seems like a good point to beat my drum: put your email address in your HN profile, people! A website link also wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise if someone wants to follow up with you about a comment, there is no way to do so without spamming a public comment reply. Contact info!
  - tredigi 2y ago
    That won't work because many people here post anonymously. They have a throwaway account and make a new one now and then to leave no trace to their real identity. Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account. Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it. Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here. I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.
    - user_7832 2y ago
      > Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account. Apple's hide my email or DDG's email services are good for that imo. > I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now. Take a guess ;)

mihaic 2y ago

While there really is a trend to overly dumb down things, I'd just like to speculate that the "message no longer exists" part is simply these when someone adapted the reasonable error for a delete message, and forgot to actually check if that phrasing work anymore. Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.

protomolecule 2y ago

Funny that the author himself failed to reproduce Feynman's quote: it should be "And there are now sixty two kinds of particles", not "And there are not sixty two kinds of particles".

nicbou 2y ago

I struggle a lot with this in my work. I can’t assume that my readers are fluent English speakers, nor that they understand the topic. I can’t even assume that they care to understand. I have adopted a plain and unambiguous writing style that hopefully accounts for it. I am now experimenting with formatting that allows them to skim everything and still get the gist of it. In my opinion, nhs.uk is the best example to learn from. People are not stupid, but they are busy, tired, lazy, or simply not that interested in the finer details. There is a balance between respecting their intellect and respecting their time.

kohbo 2y ago
How come you're avoiding every contraction, except "can't"?
- zexbha 2y ago
  I would not have observed this on my own. Do contractions make English harder to comprehend for non-natives? I'll have to avoid using y'all'dn't've
  - Aspos 2y ago
    Yes they do
- lupire 2y ago
  Common English. The "n't” contractions are the most comfortable, and "can't" is most comfortable because it saves a syllable.
- DavidPiper 2y ago
  That's a cool observation - it could just be GP's natural turn of phrase. I know a few people who never use any contractions when they speak. I assume it's a local/familial style.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
2y ago

fragmede 2y ago

“This message will self-destruct after reading.”

faku312 2y ago

[flagged]

MrPatan 2y ago

In UX, the right way to think about your users is not that they are dumb, but that they are very smart but very busy, and don't have time for your app's bullshit. It puts you in the right frame of mind when designing interfaces. It's not about dealing with dunces, but about being efficient with peoples time and attention.

bluenose69 2y ago

The "This message can't be saved" text is not that bad, actually. The important thing is that the second part tells the user what to do. The first part could be rewritten "An error occurred" and that would be fine, too, since the details are not likely to matter to the user -- the important thing is what the user ought to do next. A driver does not need to know the reason for a detour. All that matters is whether the alternative route is clearly indicated.

eastbound 2y ago
It’s pretty important to know the cause, though. “The message doesn’t exist” is fairly different from “You password/token/auth is expired and thus, the message can’t be saved”. Or “the hard drive is unavailable” or “the network has timed out”. It’s also important to know what action can’t be done. “The message can’t be saved” from “The message can’t be viewed anymore” which hints that it may have been properly saved. Please don’t bring back the fashion of dialog boxes just showing “Error in the system”. Or even “Error 1521”, which, although nowadays it would help for a perfect StackOverflow search, is still annoying.

satisfice 2y ago

The author introduces a distinction that I hadn't fully considered before: difficult writing is not all equally problematic. Being misunderstood is a problem, but how and why you are misunderstood matters.

wszrfcbhujnikm 2y ago

Nah I like New Scientist and Quanta Magazine etc… to give me an insight into a complicated topic. It isn’t adequate for a professor to understand the subject to write a thesis sure, but there is no harm in more people kinda understanding something. This is especially true of the sort of dumbing down the big short film did, when the impact on society means everyone should sort of understand what happened Nd why the economy tanked.

amelius 2y ago
I dunno. We now have ChatGPT to dumb things down for us __and__ allow us to ask questions. I think the importance of these popular science magazines may be disappearing.
OmarShehata 2y ago
Quanta is a great example! They don't dumb things down. It passes feymans razor because the professor can read it and know what it's talking about I think it'd be a fun follow-up and talk a quanta article, and some PhD in the topic, and walk through why it does (or does not) pass this razor. I think one very simple but important thing they do is they don't shy away from mentioning the technical terms. I just opened a random one and in the first paragraph they say the word "Hamiltonian cycle", and explain it. The explanation is probably super simplified, but that's fine, it's (1) an anchor for the curious layperson to read more/Google it (2) it's a marker for the expert, he immediately knows what they're talking about, and doesn't have to try to reconstruct it/guess

greekanalyst 2y ago

Simplicity is key, but over-simplicity is a killer.

taneq 2y ago

Something I’ve been doing recently is declaring a variable, writing a comment explaining clearly what the variable actually does, then renaming the variable to reflect the comment. If I have to explain the variable name too much then it’s not a good name.

ordu 2y ago

Why this obsession with "all words must be known"? People are perfectly capable to understand the core of the message even if it contains unknown words. It happens not every time, it doesn't happen for example when each one of the words is unknown, but the message: > "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted." can be understood. Even if the first sentence looks like a technical garbage, the second gives the clear instructions. And I don't believe that the first sentence is a complete nonsense to a layman. It can be understood as "message is halfway through the process of the deletion".

mannykannot 2y ago

There's an association here to another topic which came up recently: a review of Matt Strassler's new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea [1]. Professor Strassler says a big motivation for writing this book was what he calls 'phibs': 'explanations' of physics so bowdlerized that they are not just uninformative, but at least misleading and sometimes outright wrong. The particular phib which got him started was a commonly-repeated attempt to give an idea of how the Higgs field gives rise to the masses of certain particles [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607307 [2] https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field-is-nothing-like-molasses-soup-or-a-crowd/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2024/04/16/why-the-higgs-field...

aaron695 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Archelaos 2y ago

The case of the original error message does not really match what Feynman was concerned about. The original error message was not too simple, but its first part was some hocus-pocus that made (almost) no sense -- the less, the more the reader is a layperson. Only an expert had a chance of guessing the explanation. In the quoted passage, Feynman instead was concerned about popular accounts of science that are not useful for the reader -- not because they are unintelligible or wrong, but because they are too simplistic and provide too less information.

corinn3 2y ago

Yeah computing day to day sure is mired in euphemisms for math. Cache is a variable. Server is a function. Anyone who graduated high school should know that much. Hopefully we’ll start to move away from 1900s ignorant business machines euphemisms for applied physics

amai 2y ago

„Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.“ The last part of this quote is often forgotten.